Financial Times's New Measurement; Twitter TV Ad Boost

Contently’s Sam Petulla interviews Jon Slade, digital ad director for the FT, on the FT’s new “time spent” currency being implemented instead of CPMs. He explains, “We’re working from a hypothesis that one hour is our currency, with a minimum of five seconds of exposure. So we could sell you 720 impressions at five seconds or other lengths of exposure, depending on the total time you would like. Our task during the summer is determining how to find and sell the five seconds of time to c-level executives the right way.” Read more. Interesting take.

Tweeting Boosts TV Ads

Leveraging Twitter could increase the effectiveness of television ad campaigns, according to new research by Starcom MediaVest Group. The six-month study monitored paired TV and Twitter ads, and showed that Twitter-supported TV campaigns have a 50% greater ROI than TV-only campaigns. "When you run both TV and Twitter together, we actually think budgets can go from the digital side to TV,” Twitter's president of global revenue, Adam Bain, told Digiday in Cannes. “Spending on Twitter makes your digital outcomes go farther, but your TV outcomes go farther as well.” Read on.

Showrooming The Showroom

Walmart Labs acquired Stylr on Tuesday, in an effort to enhance the in-store mobile experience. Stylr, which is headquartered in NY's Silicon Alley, offers a mobile app that helps shoppers find their preferred clothing brands in nearby stores. "Over half of Walmart smartphone users have used their device in-store to assist with their shopping," said Walmart Lab’s global head of mobile and digital, Gibu Thomas, in a Walmart Labs blog post, "With 80% of our customers under the age of 35 owning a smartphone, we expect this to grow dramatically." Read on.

Global Consulting

Global research agency Millward Brown bought EffectiveBrands on Tuesday. The acquisition will roll together consulting company EffectiveBrands and Millward Brown's strategy consulting unit to form Millward Brown Vermeer. You know... strataconsultegy. Read more.

Mapping Data

WPP-owned data facilitating company The Data Alliance struck a partnership on Tuesday with Factual. The agreement lets WPP operating companies access mapping data for more than 65 million businesses. GroupM, Kantar, JWT, Cohn & Wolfe and Wunderman, for example, can all now leverage Factual's data that maps known locations of mobile phones. The data will also be incorporated into WPP's programmatic platform, Xaxis. Xaxis Chairman David J. Moore said that Factual's data can increase Xaxis’s ability to provide relevant ads based on geography. Read the press release. And read AdExchanger 2013 interview with Factual. Factual CEO Gil Elbaz was also the founder of the company, which helped create Google’s AdSense product.

TV Clypd

Clypd, a company developed by the makers of mobile ad network WHERE (which PayPal acquired in 2011), says it has developed a system to better help automate the process of programmatic TV ad buys. Cox Media Group’s VP of biz dev, Mike Zeigler, told AdWeek that legacy spot-buying systems “are focused on scheduling 30-second spots in a traditional fashion, but now we can do it in a much more automated manner.” Clypd’s claim is that its new software API links digitally attuned systems such as Turn and DataXu to television providers like Cox. Readmore.

Private Shift

Last week GroupM announced plans to yank its clients' budgets from open ad exchanges, Beet.TV first reported. Yesterday, Xaxis’ Brian Lesser walked it back a bit, according to Zach Rodgers in Cannes. Nevertheless, Ad Age reporter Tim Peterson asks the question: What does the proposed shift mean for the industry? The move draws a line in the sand between ad tech operators that have added private exchanges and those that have not, says Peterson. Google, AOL and Yahoo all operate both open and private exchanges and if the shift to private starts trending, ad tech intermediary companies might be edged out. Read more